Murder Most Foul Read online

  There was a long pause. We’d emptied the bottle. He would make a formidable opponent in the desert. I wondered if the things he had told me would make me loathe him in the future. I wondered what would happen to the farm if he did not come back.

  “You leave tonight?” I asked.

  “Yes. They may be too impatient to wait for Saturday. I will need the Land Rover. It will be at the duka of Ranjitsingh on the track just north of Isiolo. Do you know the stores?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gütig.” He stood up, lost his balance and tipped heavily against the wall. By the pale lamp glow, his head was like a trophy set against the plaster. Suddenly he thrust out his hand. I didn’t move to take it. Sweat stood out on his forehead. In his lifetime, he would have asked damned few favors of any man. He was asking one of me now. I suddenly realized what he might be planning out in the desert.

  I made a quick decision, stood up. “I’m coming with you.”

  For a moment, his face was ugly. Then he nodded. “I see. Ja. He is not nearly so tough as he pretends, this one. I will send a messenger when I have finished with them, up there in the desert.”

  He was lightning fast. His huge fist crashed into the angle of my jaw like a rock thrown during a riot. My head slammed against the wall. I had been right: he did not dare let me accompany him. When I came around, he was gone.

  On Saturday, of course, Avrohom accused me of betraying the Cause. To him there was only one, which should consume all men.

  “Don’t be a bloody fool. He’d have to clear immigration and the tax department to leave the country. My Land Rover is at Isiolo. He will have gone afoot into the desert like John the bloody Baptist.”

  Avrohom liked the poetic justice of tracking Odendahl down in the hot red soil, acacia thorn. Old Testament desert of the N.F.D., where even the boran and Rendille used camels to get about. I rode with them to Isiolo. Apart from the duka-wallah’s chickens roosting in it, my Land Rover was waiting untouched…

  Three weeks passed. At Barclay’s Bank in Nakuru, I found that Odendahl had deeded the farm to me the day after receiving Helldorf’s letter.

  The short rains started, bringing their unbelievable red sunsets. And then Odendahl’s messenger arrived. I was on the veranda, watching the onset of evening, and Morengaru was cleaning his shotgun.

  Suddenly he raised his head; his nostrils quivered. “Mzungu. Mtu mbaya sana.”

  Then I saw Avrohom coming, alone, up the lane from the tarmac. He was carrying a sisal sack. Morengaru drifted off.

  “Morengaru says you are an evil man,” I told him.

  He stopped at the foot of the steps, his dark fanatic’s eyes accusing me. His skin was blackened by the desert sun, eroded by the desert wind. His clothes hung on his fleshless body.

  “Do not joke. Canning.” Even his voice seemed deeper. He’d peeped into hell. “Yankev and Ayzik are dead. They heeded mankind’s cry for vengeance—”

  “Or didn’t heed a couple of bullets coming their way at twenty-seven hundred feet a second. Is Odendahl dead, too?”

  For the first time, he grinned, a twitch of wasted facial muscles like the grin of a gut-shot hyena. He upturned the sack onto the stoop, contempt and amusement and triumph warring for control of his face.

  “Something you learned from the Jivaros?” I asked coldly.

  “From the Nazis. They made lampshades and book jackets…” He stirred Odendahl’s flayed head with his boot. His mouth worked as if he were trying to spit. He cried: “Death to all oppressors of my people!”

  As he boiled the wattle bark he had carried into the desert for tanning to preserve it, as he beheaded the body and slit the scalp down the nape to remove the skull, had he felt no premonition of failure? Had he never realized that this poor trophy of his prowess was in reality Odendahl’s final victory? For now I was sure, of course.

  When he bent to pick it up, my voice crackled. “Leave it.”

  The light was fading. A mousebird twittered in the hedge.

  Avrohom straightened, his eyes immense in his famished face. “But I must take it,” he said. “This is proof that Yankev and Ayzik did not die in vain. To you, it would just be a souvenir, but to me—”

  “Christ!” I burst out. “What the bloody hell do you think I’m going to do with it, hang it on the bloody wall?” I savored the words. “I’m going to bury it. Odendahl was my friend.”

  I already knew I wouldn’t shoot him, but he misread the death still lingering in my eyes, and backed away from his obscene prize.

  “Did you really think you were tracking him down, and tricking him, and finally taking him?” I continued pleasantly. “Odendahl?”

  “What do you mean?” His voice was high and breathless. I nearly laughed aloud. He took a threatening step. “What do you mean? He was a coward. He ran from us. When we caught him, he would have begged…”

  “He wanted you to survive, Avrohom. He needed you to bring me back the message that it was over. That he had paid.”

  That he had knocked me out because he was going to let them kill him. That pride had demanded he take two with him; but that Franz Kalt had disappeared, and Franz Odendahl, white settler of Kenya, had redeemed the past.

  “I don’t believe you,” Avrohom whispered harshly.

  “Yes, you do. And some time you’ll want to come back and finish me so you can hide the truth from yourself. I hope you try it. Morengaru and I know some tricks that would keep you alive for days.”

  He gave me a last stunned look, then turned blindly away, arms hanging limply at his sides, sack forgotten in the dust. Going down the lane, he stumbled twice, and I laughed at his back. He would not return. There would be no more Helldorfs for him, for now he knew fear.

  Behind me, the houseboy began pumping the paraffin lamp. In the forest, the leopards would be on the prowl, their golden eyes dilated in the gloom. Despite the Old Boy, I felt an affinity for them. Odendahl would have understood that feeling. Avrohom never would. That really was his downfall: there was too much he never would understand. He should have left Odendahl alone, and he should have stayed out of Africa. He had tried to make use of her, without ever realizing that even for her lovers, she’s a damned harsh mistress.

  This Is a Watchbird Watching You

  Allan Kim Lang

  Skreen, a man with no friends and a precarious profession, answered his doorbell with muscles poised for judo and alibis ready on his tongue. But Skreen had been lucky for years, and he was lucky tonight. No big foot rammed forward to kick the door off its peepchain; no pistol-muzzle peeked in through the gap; no one bowled in steaming teargas bombs the way the Dope Cops did in Skreen’s worryings.

  This midnight visitor wasn’t on the Narcotics Squad. She was trembling, wet-eyed, out of breath; one moment yawning, the next choking back a spasm of nausea. Skreen flipped the peep-chain loose and grabbed the girl into his living room. This kid was a customer for a fix. He made sure the nightlatch caught and set the peep-chain’s holder back in its channel.

  “Who saw you come up here?” he demanded.

  “I got here invisible,” the girl said. “Sneaked in the back way, hoofed up twenty-three flights. That sounds high, dad; real high; but I’m down, ’way down.” She leaned back against the door with her eyes shut, gasping. “I don’t jolt quick. I’ll die here all in a knot.”

  “Who put you on I pushed junk?” Skreen asked.

  “Boom-Boom. He passed word you’re the big peddler just before they put him on the train for Lex,” she said.

  “Boom-Boom’s got a runny mouth,” Skreen said. “He’d be smart not to come back from the bluegrass.” He grabbed the girl by one arm, pulled her upright, unbuttoned her jacket and stripped it off. The elbow fold of her left arm was padded. Skreen tugged the bandage loose. The skin underneath looked like a bedsore. “Ought to cook your needle, honey,” he suggested. “Ever hear about germs?” He tossed her jacket onto a chair.

  “Now you know I’m for real, you gonna give me
that fix?”

  “Give? Honey, I don’t dig give,” Skreen said. “The word that gets to me is sell.” He walked over to the big window that faced, across a playground, a block of apartments identical to the one he lived in. On the ledge outside his window were half a dozen potted geranium plants, fat-stemmed and rank-smelling. Skreen dipped his fingertips into the black dirt of the second flowerpot from the right and brought out a tiny envelope of waxed paper. “This is half a spoon of brown H,” he told the girl. He walked over to wave his merchandise under her nose. “This is the prime stuff, honey. Sugar this deck eight to one, and you got yourself a dozen fixes. I don’t retail regular, dig? But you can take this goody home for fifty.” Skreen tossed the packet from hand to hand, watching the trembling girl. “Say something, hey? You want to pop, or you run up two dozen sets of steps just to dig the cat?”

  “Fifty dollars?” she whispered.

  “You don’t like my price, try the Red Cross,” Skreen suggested. “They’re in the charity business.”

  “I haven’t got fifty bucks.”

  “So you’re angling for a price-cut, too,” Skreen said. “Okay, honey. To get you out of my pad I’ll let you score for a low, low forty. Forty bucks, and you can cut down twenty-three flights with your head on straight.”

  “I don’t have dime one,” the girl said. “But I’m hurting, dad.” She hugged her arms across her belly to control the cramps. Then, smiling with her teeth clenched, she reached out one trembling hand to stroke the lapel of Skreen’s dressing gown. “Give me one jolt, and I’ll stick around later for anything you got in mind.”

  Skreen slapped the girl’s hand off him. He dropped the envelope of heroin into his pocket. “You carrying no gold, honey, you got nothing I want. You want to float, you got to pay your fare.”

  She grabbed his arm. “Dad, I’ll do anything!” She let go Skreen and clutched at her middle to fight the cramps.

  Skreen twisted the nightlatch, freed the chain, darted his head into the hall. He grabbed the girl and trotted her toward the door. “Do me good to kick you down a step at a time, I wasn’t so tired.”

  “I’ll blow the whistle!” she screamed. “I’ll yell to the nabs that it’s you Boom-Boom and the others push for; I’ll tell how you bury your Horse in flowerpots.”

  Skreen slapped his hand over her mouth, dragged her back inside, locked the door again. He grunted as she bit his hand, and retaliated by rapping his knuckles against her teeth.

  “I’ll even with you for that!” she promised. “I’ll tell ’em to send a man to Lex and bring back Boom-Boom. He’ll talk like the judge was his mother, and you’ll ship out to the pen carrying every junk rap in the law library.” She doubled up, her face taut with nausea. Skreen pulled back from her.

  The girl straightened up and ran to the window. Grabbing the second-from-the-right flowerpot, she cracked it against the window ledge and was pawing through soil and roots when Skreen grabbed her around the hips and hoisted her out over the flowerpots. A couple of the geraniums tottered and almost followed the girl. Skreen raked them back to safety.

  She mewed like a kitten all the way down. The last sound, at the bottom, was tiny and wet. Skreen stepped back from the window. She must have hit the hedges bordering the playground. When his breathing had slowed, he peered down at the playground. No flashlights bobbed toward the body, no excited voices yelled for other excited voices to come and take a look. The girl had fallen into the night and disappeared.

  Using two magazines as broom and dustpan, Skreen swept up the uprooted geranium and the shards of its pot. He picked several of his waxed-paper envelopes from the sweepings, added the deck from his pocket, and replanted the heroin in the soil of the five remaining flowerpots. He wiped the black dirt from his hands with his handkerchief and dropped the magazines, the sweepings, and the handkerchief into his wastebasket. Too bad about that geranium, he mused. He’d have to buy a replacement tomorrow.

  Nothing in the girl’s jacket. In her purse a pack of Kleenex, a lighter, some keys, seven cents, and the tools of her habit: a strip of elastic, a 2cc syringe and a needle, a wad of cotton, and her cook-spoon. The spoon was blackened by having been heated over the cigarette lighter. Skreen dumped the stuff back into the purse, opened his door and peered out into the hallway. No haps there. The girl said she’d sneaked up the stairs. Good; he’d do the same, and sneak higher. He draped the jacket over the purse to hide it, and padded down the hall to the stairwell.

  The roof was five flights up. Skreen stepped out next to the elevator enclosure, a box one story high, perched on the roof of the main building. All the motors were silent. The squares are bedded down for the night, Skreen thought, all nine-to-five types, in the sack at sundown.

  Carrying the girl’s purse and jacket, he climbed the steel ladder to the top of the elevator shed. He walked to the unprotected edge and looked over. Three hundred feet below him that hype kid was splashed over the scene, but in the dark he couldn’t see a thing.

  He stepped back from the roof edge, wary of the night-wind pressing into his back. Bracing his feet into the gravel roof, he polished the clasp of the purse against the hem of his dressing-gown before tossing it over the edge to join its owner on the playground.

  Skreen climbed down a yard from the roof of the elevator shed and hung the girl’s jacket on the top rung of the ladder, like a banner, where the nabs mooching around in the morning would be sure to spot it. The kid had been a user; they’d know that from the gear in her purse and the needle-tracks in her arm. The bulls from Narcotics and Homicide would stand on the edge of the roof of the elevator shed and jump to the conclusion that she’d been just another junkie kicking her habit the one sure way, getting the cure that comes at the end of a five-second flight.

  When he went back downstairs to his apartment, Skreen left the door to the roof stand open. A draft blew up the stairwell, another clue to push the law toward the answer he wanted them to get. He watched the late show on TV, washed down a braunschweiger sandwich with a couple beers, and went to bed.

  Skreen’s day began with a trip downstairs, at noon, for breakfast. Alone in the elevator with the operator, he made an opening for conversation. “Looks like a great day,” he said.

  “Great?” the old man asked. “Mister Skreen, this is the worst day this place had in thirty years. Some doll brodied off our roof last night. First suicide we had since 1936. Smashed her all up, right next to the teeter-totters.”

  “Didn’t know,” Skreen apologized.

  “Awful,” the operator said. “One of the cops said she left some of her clothes hanging on a ladder there, like she was going swimming.”

  “Person have to be crazy,” Skreen said.

  “Never find me jumping off roofs,” the operator said, opening the door at ground floor. “Not even all dressed up.”

  Skreen checked the morning paper over his sausage and eggs. The dead girl was fitted into an inch of space on page five, headlined as an unidentified suicide. There was no mention of her having been an addict. Her body, which had bounced off a section of hedge onto the fulcrum of a teeter-totter, had been discovered by a boy crossing the playground on his way to the grocery for milk.

  For guidance through his day, Skreen examined the horoscope column. Today the stars advised him, as a Moon Child, to “…make collections, pay debts. Put long-considered plans quickly into action. P.M. you will talk with an important person.” With his second cup of coffee, Skreen digested this intelligence. Good day for pickups and payoffs, but what about the plans he was supposed to jump with? Probably meant he’d be smart to find himself a fresh pad, a project that had been hanging fire for months. Half the hypes in town must know his address by now, especially since Boom-Boom blabbed. Couldn’t have junkies sailing out his window every night; but he couldn’t cut out today, either. The screws from Homicide might wonder why he’d moved, what had bugged him.

  Maybe the stars would let me wait a week, Skreen thought. He got up from the tab
le, anxious to get the day begun, impatient to meet the important person due him in the afternoon.

  Carrying his briefcase, he set to work. He delivered three packages of Horse to drops where his pushers would pick them up, cut the strong brown heroin with lactose or rice-flour, and pass the diluted junk on to their customers. Skreen visited Bailey’s Place, the bar maintained as headquarters for the organization’s punitive department. He gave one of the muscles the name of a pusher who’d taken a junkie’s credit for three hundred dollars’ worth of dust. The junkie was in the county jail now, sweating ninety days of cold turkey. The pusher couldn’t pungle up Skreen’s three hundred. Skreen was impatient. He gave the strongman instructions to dump the erring pusher hard enough to remind him that dope is a cash-and-carry trade.

  Skreen’s third chore was to leave an envelope fat with twenty-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills in a locker at the Greyhound station. Tomorrow he’d pick up from that locker a tobacco can filled with tan powder, enough Horse to keep a head on fifteen hundred hypes over the coming weekend.

  At four, Skreen was done for the day. He shopped for a fresh geranium and took it to a square bar where he had a couple of beers. Then, the potted plant under his arm, he headed for his apartment.

  He was taking a shower when the phone rang. Nobody knew his number but the people he worked for, who sometimes phoned slang-coded instructions. Those people didn’t care to be kept waiting.

  Skreen ran dripping to the living room, leaving the shower squirting, and snatched up the phone. “Yeah?” he asked, his voice cautious.

  “Giving any flying lessons today?” a strange voice asked.